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DevOps is Coming and It's About Damn Time!

We have all felt the pain of the schism. In corporate America, it is everywhere. You go to a meeting, it is there. In the offices when the doors are closed, it is there. Even in the cafeteria and in the elevator it is there. The pain of schism between the business is so palpable and so wide spread it has spawned a manifesto and a movement. Oops — I misspoke! It has spawned two manifestos and two movements.

Agile's Lesser Known Twin Sibling

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of agile. Agile was meant to heal the schism and it has done a lot, but it simply cannot do the whole job by itself because it stops too soon. When the right sort of people are combined with agile principals and tactics, good things seem to happen. Agile's focus is at the front lines — between the business and development. DevOps applies the same sort of principal based model to the inner workings of the IT machine.

About 9 months ago I was at SXSW and I went to a talk entitled "When IT Says No" given by Gene Kim. I thought I was going to a UX talk about how product professionals can learn to improve their relationship with IT departments. What I found was something completely different. Gene wasn't talking about UX at all. Gene was talking about the schism between software development and IT Operations and how DevOps was inspired and designed to heal the schism inside of IT.

Gene and I got to talking after his session and each of us came to a state of giddy excitement as we discussed IT Kung Fu, relationship dynamics, and the application of spiritual philosophy and the humanities inside of IT and business settings. Eventually, Gene and I got to talking about the books he was working on and that his adaptation of the hero's journey was almost complete. Fast forward 9 months and the book launch is upon us. I had a chance to talk in depth with Gene about the book and his mission to change the lives of IT professionals everywhere.

The Phoenix Project

his hero, Bill Palmer, on a journey that is a melding of two classic business novels — The Goal by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and The Five Dysfunctions of Team by Patrick Lencioni. Bill is promoted to VP of IT Operations and is quickly mired in series of events that will bring his company to the brink.

Bill and the other characters in the book are department leads that are presented as a series of archetypes:

Wes - The angry IT director, quick to point his finger right back at the business

Patty - The egghead director of IT Support with an academic answer for every issue

Steve - The hard charging CEO who has become a bit too removed from the realities of his team

Sarah - The narcissistic SVP of retail operations constantly politicking her way to the top

As Bill struggles to pull his IT Operations team out of a state of constant chaos, he gets introduced to a shamanistic, eccentric IT teacher, Erik. Erik uses the Socratic method of teaching to help Bill see the "Three Ways of DevOps".

The Three Ways

The first of the Three Ways is to recognize and apply systems thinking to IT work. In applying systems thinking to IT processes, a DevOps practitioner must place value on the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department. This First Way emerges from an idea called the "Theory of Constraints".

Endangered Species: The Corporate Intranetview commentsThe very idea that we’re still doing old-fashioned, browser-based, news-publishing intranets in the mobile era is downright antiquated. They’re no different than rotary-dial phones. And they’re going the same direction...

We have all felt the pain of the schism. In corporate America, it is everywhere. You go to a meeting, it is there. In the offices when the doors are closed, it is there. Even in the cafeteria and in the elevator it is there. The pain of schism between the business is so palpable and so wide spread it has spawned a manifesto and a movement. Oops -- I misspoke! It has spawned two manifestos and two movements.

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Endangered Species: The Corporate Intranetview commentsThe very idea that we’re still doing old-fashioned, browser-based, news-publishing intranets in the mobile era is downright antiquated. They’re no different than rotary-dial phones. And they’re going the same direction...